A Hot, Wet Disaster

The United Nations' Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change released a report this past week saying that unless the world acts in the next decade, there is no way we can escape the worst effects of climate change - longer heat waves, rising sea levels, persistent droughts, stronger hurricanes and nor'easters, and Florida falling into the sea.  Unless we do anything, the worst, most irreversible  effects would be felt as soon as 2040, a date no farther in the future than 1996 - the year of Bill Clinton's re-election to the Presidency, the Macarena, and Muhammad Ali lighting the torch at the Atlanta Olympics - is in the past.

See goodbye to Miami.  We ain't gonna do nothin' to stop climate change.

We Americans - a rather amoral, selfish confederacy of imbeciles, idiots, morons and circus pinheads - have made it clear that we have no interest in combating, or even believing in the existence of, climate change.  Well, okay, not all of us, but a majority of us.  And one of those climate-change deniers, a guy so stupid that he flunked recess in grade school, is President of the United States.

A sizable number of voters continue to reject presidential candidates who put climate change front and center among the policies they espouse.  Nowhere was that more obvious than when Al Gore was ridiculed for his climate crusade during the 2000 presidential campaign despite his strong credentials on the issue as a U.S. Senator and as Vice President. More recently, Martin O'Malley (if you're sick and tired of hearing about him, well, kiss my posterior!) made climate change a centerpiece of his 2016 presidential campaign, proposing initiatives such as having the Environmental Protection Agency adopt a zero-tolerance policy for methane leaks from fossil-fuel production, canceling Keystone XL pipeline, prohibiting further offshore drilling and drill leases in Alaska, ending fossil-fuel subsidies (which would make gasoline more expensive and force people to drive smaller cars), and setting the United States on course to be powered by 100% clean energy by 2050.

We all know what happened.  Just look at all of those SUVs with "Ready For Hillary" bumper stickers still on them.  

Right now the White House is controlled by greedy polluters who were all too happy to put the American pledge to honor the Paris Agreement through the shredder, and we have an entire political party that is so convinced that climate change isn't real that it disbanded a climate-change subcommittee in the House of Representatives when they regained their House majority.  If they acknowledge climate change at all, they think of it as what happens every three months with the equinoxes and solstices.  So, no, I see no future for getting serious about climate change . . . or the planet.      

America Cops Out of Climate Change

The Twenty-Third Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP23)  is meeting this week and next in Bonn, Germany to implement the Paris Agreement on combating global warming.  Fiji is hosting because the Asia-Pacific nations got to chose among themselves to host it, and it's being held in Germany because Fiji doesn't have the facilities. 

Well, I know of one country that has the ability to host the gathering and also the ability to actually do something about climate change, and it happens to be on the Pacific, but unfortunately it is the United States, whose official policy is to deny the existence of climate change and pull out of the Paris Agreement. 

The United States is taking part in this conference, incidentally, because it's still required to remain in the accord until November 3, 2020 (the day of the next presidential election, incidentally), but the Trump Administration's representatives, I have been led to understand, are a skeleton delegation that is expected to advocate the burning of more fossil fuels as a reliable source of energy.

Meanwhile, Syria and Nicaragua have just joined the Paris Agreement, making the United States the only country on the planet getting out of it.

Tell me how proud I should be to be an American . . . I keep forgetting. >:-(

The United States has no legitimate presence at the Bonn meeting.  The official American delegation is like the crazy uncle who showed up for the family reunion because Grandma didn't think he'd take the invitation seriously.  Meanwhile, an unofficial delegation called the We Are Still In Coalition (WASIC), a group of state governors, mayors and business leaders, is opening a pavilion at the conference to show how Americans are fighting climate change in response to a lack of one from the federal government. No one is taking either American delegation seriously - because no one knows which delegation is in the driver's seat.  (Given the American penchant for gas-guzzling automobiles, the term "driver's seat" is an appropriate metaphor.)  Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, sums up the dilemma.  "My view is that the sub-national delegates truly represent the interests of Americans, they are closer to public opinion on this," he says.  "But on the issue of negotiating, though, under our system of government it is the executive branch of the federal government that represents the U.S. in these negotiations."

In other words, WASIC should have just stayed the hell home.

Meyer is still optimistic that the United States ultimately will not leave the Paris Agreement, and so he hopes to talk to WASIC.  "This is an aberration, and whoever takes power after President Trump will restore the U.S. back into the Paris Agreement," he says.

That's news to anyone who's seen official American stonewalling on this issue for, oh, I don't know, the past twenty years?  (Can you say "Kyoto Protocol," boys and girls?)

Am I optimistic that the WASIC can get results despite Trump?  No, I'm not.  I know that Democrats won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, and Phil Murphy and/or Ralph Northam may join Jerry Brown's coalition,  but my feeling is that, as long as Trump is President, state, local and private pledges to stick with the Paris Agreement really don't matter.  Without support or assistance from Washington,  the We Are Still In folks can't do much on the international stage with foreign partners; they don't speak for the entire country like the federal government does.  And when the Trump Administration speaks, it says it's getting out of international agreements of cooperation; it recently announced American withdrawal from UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which globally promotes the virtues of education, science and culture.  It makes sense to me, since we're not capable of speaking for any of them.

In fact, I'm pretty much convinced that we should be expelled from the entire United Nations. The United Nations is committed to a mission of world peace and global stability, and the United States remains equally committed to a foreign policy of promoting neither.  Let the United Nations kick us out - it's what we so richly deserve.  We can find another use for the New York U.N. headquarters.  Just don't let Trump buy it and turn it into a co-op.

For one thing, it wouldn't be powered with renewables.   

American Leadership?

Donald Trump's passive stance at the Group of Twenty summit in Hamburg, especially his distancing of himself from the group's commitment to the Paris Agreement on climate change (I still can't believe the planet is going to fry because Steve Bannon made sure he was the last person Trump would hear from on this issue!), means to many observers that United States is no longer a world leader, becoming more isolationist and less engaged and involved with the world's problems.  America, they say, will be left behind.

But is it really a bad thing that America is longer willing or able to lead?  And hasn't the U.S. been left behind for years already? 

Let's get a few things straight.  The U.S. became the world leader at the end of World War II because it was one of two Western nations that hadn't been partially or completely destroyed by the war, and Canada wasn't up to the job.  The U.S. was the most powerful and wealthy nation on earth, but it wasn't necessarily the most wise or most learned nation on earth.  The U.S. lacked the wisdom of the ages, having been founded after the age of antiquity, the medieval period, and the Renaissance.  Even then, the country had a disdain for high art and deep thinking; anti-intellectualism had been an American tradition since at least 1828, when commoners, having gained the right to vote for President, had a choice between a man who could write - John Quincy Adams - and a man who could fight - Andrew Jackson.  We all know whom they chose.      

Lacking the imbued cultural and intellectual traditions of Europe, we Americans were already behind in many ways as early as 1945.  Europeans had recognized public broadcasting as a common good and a source of national unity; we emphasized commercial broadcasting from the start, with lip service to the public interest.  Centuries of sectarian conflict had alerted Europeans to the dangers of fundamentalist religion, but we Americans still embraced it (and still embrace it now) with fervor.  While Europeans had begun to accept scientific and intellectual thought challenging religious dogma, we weren't even allowing evolution to be taught in public schools and were mandating prayer in those very same school systems.  And our wealth only made us hungry for more wealth, as we set up a consumptive economy to maximize profit, not a sustainable economy to maximize quality of life.  The differences between profit motives in America and public interests in, for example, Britain became apparent in a joint project between the BBC and American broadcasters in the early thirties, where one BBC executive is reported to have told his American counterparts, "I don't understand how you Americans can worship God and Mammon at the same time."

Since 1945, we Americans have been promoting a way of life that is more of a parody of civilization than the real thing, with our lucrative auto suburbia and our disregard of cities and public spaces, an abdication of the common good in favor of individualism, the idea that every person is on his or her own (as opposed to individuality, the appreciation of uniqueness and non-conformity, which we have historically discouraged), and a sort of self-induced complacency that allowed other countries - including the defeated nations of World War II -  to surpass us in health care, public transportation, infrastructure, education, civic participation, support for the arts . . . everything, really.  

And what has our civilization produced?  A thousand channels of television that panders to the lowest common denominator?  Cartoonish action movies with lots of explosions?   A form of "music" in which mean-looking folks wearing ball caps backwards and gold chains around their necks spew out angry prose to the sound of computerized beats?  We've become a country that accepts religion at face value and questions scientific fact, when it should be the other way around, even questioning the theory of evolution because it contradicts the Bible  - and we're expected to lead the fight against climate change?   We've overthrown democratically elected and popularly supported socialist governments and replaced them with right-wing dictatorships in the name of combating Communism - and we're expected to set an example for freedom?  We've elected  a dim-bulb movie star and then a dimmer-bulb real estate mogul as President - and we're expected to provide wise leadership?  We turned higher education into a parody of itself, and a majority of Republicans - the current ruling party - think higher education of any sort is a waste of time and detriment to the nation . . . and we're expected to be provide intelligent guidance to other countries?  We're what H.L. Mencken called "a commonwealth of third-rate men" and an "Eden of clowns" - and we expect to be taken seriously as a first-rate nation?

We don't deserve to lead. We don't even deserve to follow.  We deserve to be left behind in our own stupidity.  And it's good that a nation like that doesn't lead the world anymore.